Honor 8 Pro Review

Honor 8 Pro Review

Honor 8 Pro Review: Killer flagship + giant battery!

Alex takes a look at Honor's biggest and most powerful phone yet, the Honor 8 Pro! More in our written review: http://www.androidcentral.com/honor-8-pro Be ...

Honor is a sub-brand of Chinese company Huawei usually identified for cheaper mid-range phones. However, the Honor 8 Pro is the brand’s priciest phone yet. It’s also Honor’s most accomplished thanks to a beautiful, slim design, quick performance, and a generously sized battery.

For those who like the look of the Huawei P10 Plus but can’t stomach the price, then the 5.7-inch Honor 8 Pro is worth serious consideration.

Specification

Display Size: 5.7 inches

Protection: Corning Gorilla Glass 3

OS: Android OS, v7.0 (Nougat)

Chipset: HiSilicon Kirin 960

Internal Storage: 64 GB

RAM: 6 GB RAM

Rear Camera: 12MP

Front Camera: 8MP

Design

From the front, the Honor 8 Pro appears like a larger version of the earlier Honor 8. I had the Navy Blue versions of the Honor 8 and Honor 8 Pro models in for review, and the finish on both is similar. Black and Gold options are available, too, however, I rather just like the blue. The design of the Honor 8 and Honor 8 Pro only really begins to deviate if you flip the phones over.

Display

The Honor 8 Pro has a 5.7-inch Quad HD (2560 x 1440) resolution display – and it appears unbelievable. Colors are super-vibrant, and at 515ppi (pixels per inch) the screen isn’t left wanting for sharpness. The color temperature is adjustable. However, I found it comfortable at its default settings.

Software

Software-wise, the Pro also runs EMUI 5.1, the latest iteration of Huawei’s operating re-skin (which sits over Android 7.0). The software experience isn’t always the best-looking – a few of the Themes aren’t pretty – however, it can be tweaked to suit.

Hardware and Performance

Its Kirin 960 chipset is every bit as proficient as you will find in the P10 Plus, together with 6GB RAM to go along with it (the only difference is 64GB onboard storage rather than 128GB of the Plus).

Honor has a phone that can proudly survive among the heavy-hitters. Even in our synthetic benchmarks, the Honor 8 Pro proved to be a top performer, with 6121 scores in the multicore Geekbench 4 test. That eclipses the iPhone 7 Plus (5793) and the Pixel XL (4152), however, is a fraction shy of the Huawei P10 Plus (6237).

Camera

Honor skips this top-end a part of the camera package, however. However it has a similar overall experience, with dual lenses – one monochrome sensor, one color, both of that are 12MP – able to capture and depth-map pictures for pseudo bokeh effect (that melty smooth background impact). The 8MP front camera of the Honor 8 gets a low-light boost with a brighter f/2.0 lens — though don’t expect to see a large improvement in photo quality from night-time selfies.

Battery Life

The Honor 8 Pro has a large 4000mAh battery, which seems super-generous when you consider other 5.7-inch phones, such as the LG G6, make do with cells as small as 3300mAh.

It meant that when I used the Honor 8 Pro as my main phone, it never struggled to go through a whole day.

Conclusion

The Honor 8 Pro might not be quite as future-facing as 2017’s latest flagships. However, it’s still a decent inexpensive phone. At this price level, given all the power and capability on board, it’s a real alternative to consider over the OnePlus 3T should you not wish to go and spend mega bucks on the priciest of handsets.

Honor's biggest, a highest-end handset is a supersized, supercharged version of one of our popular affordable flagships of the previous year, providing a lovely design, legendary battery life and speedy performance for less money than you'd expect to pay.